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About the Book
"2 Minute Wisdom, Volume 2" by Mike Murdock is a collection of short, inspirational messages that provide practical wisdom for daily living. The book offers quick insights and thought-provoking quotes to help readers navigate life's challenges and improve their outlook. It is a valuable resource for those seeking motivation and guidance in their personal and spiritual growth.
William Carey
"Expect great things; attempt great things."
At a meeting of Baptist leaders in the late 1700s, a newly ordained minister stood to argue for the value of overseas missions. He was abruptly interrupted by an older minister who said, "Young man, sit down! You are an enthusiast. When God pleases to convert the heathen, he'll do it without consulting you or me."
That such an attitude is inconceivable today is largely due to the subsequent efforts of that young man, William Carey.
Plodder Carey was raised in the obscure, rural village of Paulerpury, in the middle of England. He apprenticed in a local cobbler's shop, where the nominal Anglican was converted. He enthusiastically took up the faith, and though little educated, the young convert borrowed a Greek grammar and proceeded to teach himself New Testament Greek.
When his master died, he took up shoemaking in nearby Hackleton, where he met and married Dorothy Plackett, who soon gave birth to a daughter. But the apprentice cobbler's life was hard—the child died at age 2—and his pay was insufficient. Carey's family sunk into poverty and stayed there even after he took over the business.
"I can plod," he wrote later, "I can persevere to any definite pursuit." All the while, he continued his language studies, adding Hebrew and Latin, and became a preacher with the Particular Baptists. He also continued pursuing his lifelong interest in international affairs, especially the religious life of other cultures.
Carey was impressed with early Moravian missionaries and was increasingly dismayed at his fellow Protestants' lack of missions interest. In response, he penned An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. He argued that Jesus' Great Commission applied to all Christians of all times, and he castigated fellow believers of his day for ignoring it: "Multitudes sit at ease and give themselves no concern about the far greater part of their fellow sinners, who to this day, are lost in ignorance and idolatry."
Carey didn't stop there: in 1792 he organized a missionary society, and at its inaugural meeting preached a sermon with the call, "Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God!" Within a year, Carey, John Thomas (a former surgeon), and Carey's family (which now included three boys, and another child on the way) were on a ship headed for India.
Stranger in a strange land
Thomas and Carey had grossly underestimated what it would cost to live in India, and Carey's early years there were miserable. When Thomas deserted the enterprise, Carey was forced to move his family repeatedly as he sought employment that could sustain them. Illness racked the family, and loneliness and regret set it: "I am in a strange land," he wrote, "no Christian friend, a large family, and nothing to supply their wants." But he also retained hope: "Well, I have God, and his word is sure."
He learned Bengali with the help of a pundit, and in a few weeks began translating the Bible into Bengali and preaching to small gatherings.
When Carey himself contracted malaria, and then his 5-year-old Peter died of dysentery, it became too much for his wife, Dorothy, whose mental health deteriorated rapidly. She suffered delusions, accusing Carey of adultery and threatening him with a knife. She eventually had to be confined to a room and physically restrained.
"This is indeed the valley of the shadow of death to me," Carey wrote, though characteristically added, "But I rejoice that I am here notwithstanding; and God is here."
Gift of tongues
In October 1799, things finally turned. He was invited to locate in a Danish settlement in Serampore, near Calcutta. He was now under the protection of the Danes, who permitted him to preach legally (in the British-controlled areas of India, all of Carey's missionary work had been illegal).
Carey was joined by William Ward, a printer, and Joshua and Hanna Marshman, teachers. Mission finances increased considerably as Ward began securing government printing contracts, the Marshmans opened schools for children, and Carey began teaching at Fort William College in Calcutta.
In December 1800, after seven years of missionary labor, Carey baptized his first convert, Krishna Pal, and two months later, he published his first Bengali New Testament. With this and subsequent editions, Carey and his colleagues laid the foundation for the study of modern Bengali, which up to this time had been an "unsettled dialect."
Carey continued to expect great things; over the next 28 years, he and his pundits translated the entire Bible into India's major languages: Bengali, Oriya, Marathi, Hindi, Assamese, and Sanskrit and parts of 209 other languages and dialects.
He also sought social reform in India, including the abolition of infanticide, widow burning (sati), and assisted suicide. He and the Marshmans founded Serampore College in 1818, a divinity school for Indians, which today offers theological and liberal arts education for some 2,500 students.
By the time Carey died, he had spent 41 years in India without a furlough. His mission could count only some 700 converts in a nation of millions, but he had laid an impressive foundation of Bible translations, education, and social reform.
His greatest legacy was in the worldwide missionary movement of the nineteenth century that he inspired. Missionaries like Adoniram Judson, Hudson Taylor, and David Livingstone, among thousands of others, were impressed not only by Carey's example, but by his words "Expect great things; attempt great things." The history of nineteenth-century Protestant missions is in many ways an extended commentary on the phrase.
God Can Meet Us in the Ashes
Strict practitioners would not have approved of my methods, but on one long ago mid-winter Wednesday, I smeared ashes on the foreheads of my two preschoolers and myself. An offering of the hardwood that had heated our home the day before, these ashes were not “ceremonially correct” in any way. At the time, I did not know that traditional Ash Wednesday ashes come from the remains of Palm Sunday palms. I did not even know about the forty days of Lent to follow. However, I did know about sin — my own and my children’s. We were in “time out” season with one of our sons. At our wits’ end, we had exhausted Dr. Dobson, Elisabeth Elliot, and every parenting resource available in the nineties. “Why is it so hard to be good?” our little Dobson-buster would ask. His younger brother’s eyes would fill with tears whenever they were caught in collaborative naughtiness. In this parenting pressure cooker, maternal apologies had become a daily occurrence. I was hoping to model repentance — while at the same time atoning for sharp words and a short fuse. “I was wrong; please forgive me” were the words through which my sons were learning that their mother had not outgrown the struggle against sin. Ash Wednesday gives Christians an opportunity to grow in our understanding of where to take that struggle. Reclaiming Lent for Christ Historically, our earliest Protestant ancestors revolted against the idea of Lenten practices, and with good reason. In the pre-Reformation mind, penitence, ashes, and self-denial had become ends in themselves. Gradually, however, a biblical understanding of lament has re-entered Christian orthodoxy, anchored in an embrace of our fallen-ness. Ashes on the forehead rightly represent our need to “repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5–6), and our identity as “a people of unclean lips [who] dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). Jesus pronounced a blessing upon those who recognize their poverty of spirit and mourn the effects of sin on their life and in the world (Matthew 5:3–4). Grounded in gospel truth that prompts genuine penitence without crippling guilt and deep conviction without devastating shame, Ash Wednesday invites the believer to a renewed awe of our great salvation. While there is no merit in the wearing of ashes, a season of mourning leading up to Easter may actually enhance our celebration of Resurrection Sunday. A Wednesday to Teach In my challenging season of parenting, Ash Wednesday became a visual aid, a teaching tool to reassure my young sons that our sin does not signal the end of God’s love for us. In our home, hymns around the breakfast table always matched the season, and one year, we learned all four verses of a “cross hymn” in the weeks leading up to Easter. Rich hymns of the faith offer deep gospel truth that requires explanation (but not dilution) for little singers: When I survey the wondrous cross On which the Prince of Glory died, All the vain things that charm me most I sacrifice them to His blood. The vain-ness of the “vain things” Isaac Watts wrote about becomes abundantly clear when we remember that nothing lasts forever. “Remember that you are dust” is the lyric of Ash Wednesday. God made us from dust, and our bodies do not live forever. This is a dying world we inhabit: everything from goldfish to grandfathers eventually stops living. And we mourn the loss. Without becoming morbid or frightening, we can prepare our children for the inevitability of death by putting it in the context of the gospel. Thomas á Kempis prescribed a regular pondering of and preparation for death as a route to happiness. Author Gary Thomas suggests that we present-day believers ought to join á Kempis in allowing the reality of death to act “like a filter, helping us to hold on to the essential and let go of the trivial.” For believers, the “essential” is the eternal, and the eternal comes to us through the cross. The paradox of death leading to rebirth only appears to be a contradiction. All of Christ’s gifts are given to us through death — his death. And it will only be through a different death — our death — that we will finally receive the fullness of life that Jesus died to impart. A Wednesday to Remember My sons and I stood before a mirror together, the three of us with our smudged foreheads. We talked about our struggle to obey God and our sadness over sin — the sin that causes mayhem in our home, hurt feelings between brothers, and, worst of all, separation from a God who loves us. When a little boy is struggling with disobedience, even as a preschooler, he already feels the grit and grind of life on a fallen planet. He may not be able to comprehend sin’s cosmic scale: “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope. . .” (Romans 8:20). But he is already well-acquainted with the collective groaning, and can love the truth about the hope of our future deliverance from the struggle: “. . . that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). Reading selected, age-appropriate portions of the crucifixion story from Luke 22 and thinking about Jesus’s willingness to endure the weight of all the sins of the entire world on his body provides a focus for the wearing of our ashes as a symbol of our grief — mourning that we have sinned and caused division from God and sadness over the suffering Jesus endured when he died in our place. A Wednesday to Rejoice If good behavior is all I have to bring to Jesus, he cannot help me. The warm welcome of the gospel on a frigid day in early spring takes into account a little boy’s hopelessness in the face of temptation. Our sin does not signal the end of our relationship with God. It’s a beginning, for it turns out that weakness is a powerful claim upon divine mercy. Learning to hate sin at a young age, to war against it, and to receive God’s forgiveness is a celebratory milestone. There is a reason to rejoice because of Christ’s obedience to all that God commanded. Then, his love in paying the penalty for our failure to obey gives us a reason for hope, even against the backdrop of my own parenting fiascos and my sons’ serial naughtiness. God knows well the stuff we are made of. “He remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14). As a loving heavenly Father, he longs to supply every need for righteous living — in fact it is only his righteousness that will suffice. This orientation provides a solid foundation for a lifelong relationship built on the assurance that God’s purposes will not be thwarted by my sin. He delights to meet me and my children in the ashes. Article by Michele Morin
